“Descriptions of Cities that Are Not of Particular Interest to Russian Readers”: Omissions in Translations of Foreign Travel Books about Siberia (Second Half of the Nineteenth Century) as a Theme for the History of Popular Geographical Knowledge
4/2014
“Descriptions of Cities that Are Not of Particular Interest to Russian Readers”: Omissions in Translations of Foreign Travel Books about Siberia (Second Half of the Nineteenth Century) as a Theme for the History of Popular Geographical Knowledge
SUMMARY:
This article examines the history of Russian translations of foreign travel books about Siberia in 1860−1880. At the center of the study are the discrepancies revealed when the original texts and their popular Russian adaptations are compared. The article is built around three case studies of such adaptations. In each, the original text was manipulated by editors and translators. The first case is presented by translation projects of the Russian publisher Maurice Wolff in the second half of the 1860s. The second is based on the Russian translation (1882) of a travel account by Otto Finsch about his expedition of 1876 to Western Siberia. The third group of texts is presented by four different translations of George Kennan’s Siberia and the Exile System, printed during the short period of repeal of the censorship law in 1906.The author reconstructs the history of translations from the vantage point of editors, censorship, and critical reception of the translations.